What kinds of things would a Brit moving to America notice?

Sun and blue sky? I've only been near that area, but am sure there are plenty of Brits here who can help you out.

It's late for me but I'll do a proper reply post in the morning. I've done the transition, even though not to Palo Alto it should still be relevant.

Some initial thoughts/reminders for me:

* food
* social culture
* shared experiences
* work and work culture
* length of daylight/night
* seasons (or lack thereof)
* travel/cars/public transport
* healthcare
* language (and spelling)
* time differences

First Impressions from a Brit abroad in the US.

Food - Awesome.Cinnamon and sugar heavy. Massive portions. Very casual dress allowed. 24 hour availability. Variety of chains.
Clothes - Different cut, different hair, less designer stuff on your everyday bod.
Houses - Wow! Humungus!
Guns! You can shoot them!
Talk - We speak the same language, but its totally different. "Sup? Y'all? Soda? Paaark The Ka."
Roads - woah, overtaking on all sides. Tolls. Really?
Police. Oooh. More guns.
Girls. Where are their clothes?
Women in general - Do they wax everything?
Attitude. Why is everyone so happy? (See last two bullets.)
Television - Ohhh channels. Lots. BUT I MISS BBC.
Transport. Is there any?
DONUTS
GOD BLESS KRISPY KREME

Size of houses will be a huge one. The UK has the smallest average house size in Europe. Even modern middle class family homes there are "cozy" by the standards of other developed nations. Especially compared to American homes.

Let's see...things which Mr. Putt noticed the first time he came to Cali...

-"The roads! They are so wide!" He likes the wideness but not the grid system because according to him it's boring. He also finds "Xing" written on the roads confusing.

-"The sun! The suuuuuunnnnnnnn!"

-Aggressive, what he calls "impolite" drivers. He's used to English drivers, who are more considerate. Actually, we had quite a few arguments about this. For example, in Cali, I'd tell him, "You need to change to the right lane in 2 miles." and I'd expect him to give the signal to change lanes then, but he doesn't. He waits until the last possible second to give the signal, and then he complains about why people aren't letting him change lanes. According to him, in England, as soon as you give the signal to switch lanes, drivers will give you the space to switch immediately.

-Verrah tasty food in super huge portions.

-"Very friendly people who talk to me!" SO SMILEY. SO FRIENDLY. SO HAPPY. (He didn't notice this in Boston.)

-He found it harder to understand people in Boston than people in Cali.

-The huge trucks on the freeways.

-The sheer number of people wearing hoodies and car number plates that show which universities they go to.

-How expensive the foods in supermarkets are, but restaurants are relatively cheap.

-The fact that there's an annual house tax.

-The Cheesecake Factory is a lot nicer than it looks on The Big Bang Theory. (I had to force him to go to the Cheesecake Factory.)

-Yellow slugs. "Yellow slugs are very weird. We have normal black ones."

-The "horrendous" Stop signs. Every time we see one, he complains about how inefficient they are.

Size of everything. Everything. Cars. Houses. Trucks.

(English drivers are more considerate? Where the heck in England is he from? I haven't noticed a real difference)

Bluejays. English jays are salmon pink. The way they should be.

Crappy public transport. Even by comparison to British places that have crappy public transport.

Crappy train system. Sorry, Amtrak. The trains are larger and the seats are more comfortable, but the trains are constantly LATE. Even compared to British trains, which are notoriously late.

Driving on the wrong side of the road.

People driving ridiculously short distances. Lack of sidewalks in many suburbs. Lack of pedestrian footbridges or underpasses. "No wonder these people are all fat."

No good pubs. No good pubs. No good pubs. Americans don't seem to know how to do pubs. Or fish and chips. On the other hand, wow, hamburgers are actually good? Who knew...

Police carrying guns. That squicked me the first time I saw it, but I'm used to it now.

Fewer South Asian people. More black people.

The language differences, of course.

Distance. The sheer distance, which comes back to everything here being bigger.

Politics all being shifted to the right. Trust me...no matter how many people call Obama a socialist, Brits would call him a Tory...

The real thing though. Still. Scale.

The side of the road on which to drive. And space. The latter is hugely dependent on what place in the U.S. the emigrant moves to. A big city in the northeast might not seem all that different, but . . . Wyoming? Nevada? Nebraska? Alaska? Nowhere in Britain does there exist so much territory essentially vacant of habitation.

caw

The ads on TV. British TV ads are (mostly) more subtle. The America-centric focus of the news. The religiosity of people.

I'll be back later but, as a veteran of five cross-Pond visits (one whirlwind stop in NYC, a week's reccie-ing in Colorado and three monster road trips - 18 states visited in total and ~25,000 miles driving) I'll list the things I noticed most.

I'll start with two things:

1). The Cheesecake Factory = Heaven! If Penny on TBBT doesn't want her job there, I'll have it. Dutch Caramel Apple Streusel is my absolute favourite. Please open one near my house (which is thought of as being quite big for a 20-year-old 3-bed detached, apparently - most modern houses are little boxes, no doubt filled with ticky-tacky).

2). The driving over here. Courteous?!?! (#breaks to roll around the floor laughing hysterically). These days driving lessons teach most people to pass the test, not how to drive (a bit like school is these days, and don't get me started on that!) so most have no clue that they need to read the road beyond the car's bonnet (hood). My dad made me learn to drive in Croydon - Sarrrf Lahhhndan - a baptism of fire, but thanks to the skills I learnt I survived Texas (specifically Houston = shudder).

Go on then, one more:

3). Driving on t'other side of the road. The first ten minutes are scary and involve a lot of hyperventilation and bad language. Then it's instantly fine. The road signs are a bit confusing the first time you drive in the US, but once you've worked out the logic behind them they pretty much work. Not many roundabouts (traffic circles?), so when you do meet one it's terrifying because you think you're driving round it the wrong way!

Until later...

LPH.

p.s. You can get decent burgers over here, you just need to know where to go. None of that Maccy-D ****, thank you very much!

The 'bigness' of everything
Shitty selection of lousy cheeses in supermarkets.
Whut? Cheese in a box that's not in the refrigerated section?
Brain exploding from trying to decide which salad dressing to buy
Obsession with Ranch dressing.
Select '1' for English, select '2' for Spanish when you phone something like an insurance company.
Crazy big rig drivers
Firearms carried openly by police
Virtually no international news coverage
Vicious campaign ads
The Weather Channel
Not a decent curry to be found anywhere.
Obsession with redneck culture
Lots of TV commercials
Being paid every couple of weeks instead of once a month
Trying to get a mortgage when you have no US credit history
The importance of your Social Security number
Lunchtime drinking being frowned upon
Health insurance
Doing the annual income tax return.

I could go on and on, having hopped back and forth across the pond a couple of times.

Addendum to what I previously posted, and this is based on first-hand experience of having lived in the U.K., and having British friends in the U.S.:

The east-west-north-south grid of the road system, as it exists outside the states that constituted the oriignal 13 colonies. The Land Ordinance of 1787, which precedes even the U.S. Constitution, set up a surveying system of section/township/range that dictated the land usage of most of the rest of the nation, as it developed. You go to a place like Iowa, and everything nearly everywhere is a grid based on ordinal directions. Long straight roads and streets drive a hard-core Brit nutso. But roundabouts are becoming more common in the U.S. in recent years, so maybe that's a little heartwarming.

Provided, of course, that Brits have hearts to be warmed, which might be an issue.

caw

blacbird said:

Addendum to what I previously posted, and this is based on first-hand experience of having lived in the U.K., and having British friends in the U.S.:

The east-west-north-south grid of the road system, as it exists outside the states that constituted the oriignal 13 colonies. The Land Ordinance of 1787, which precedes even the U.S. Constitution, set up a surveying system of section/township/range that dictated the land usage of most of the rest of the nation, as it developed. You go to a place like Iowa, and everything nearly everywhere is a grid based on ordinal directions. Long straight roads and streets drive a hard-core Brit nutso. But roundabouts are becoming more common in the U.S. in recent years, so maybe that's a little heartwarming.

Provided, of course, that Brits have hearts to be warmed, which might be an issue.

caw

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Ha!
I was a Town Planner. And it was a culture shock to go from a no-growth environment to 'yes please you can build whatever you like, provided it complies with the zoning code'.
The grid system took some getting used to, and the legal descriptions we had to use when advertising a public hearing for a zoning application.

Thought of some more stuff:
Temperatures not given in celsius
Strong sense of patriotism/national pride
Real Mexican food, especially in California and the South West
Small cars being a rarity
Hummers
Lousy chocolate/tea
Hardly any choice of instant coffees
Extreme weather

Not London, but also on the bigness theme--Had a German penpal once who wanted to visit the US and honestly thought he was going to see New York, Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco, L.A., and Seattle... all in 3 weeks. No idea at all of how much of that time would have to be spent traveling.

Dragonwriter said:

I'm starting another novel in my series, and going back to the MC's "origin story," describing the circumstances under which he came to live in the USA.

He's a British mage, age late 20s, who's also a professor of Occult Studies. For reasons that will be detailed in the novel, he wants to get out of England and make a new start to get away from some personal stuff going on over there. He moves to the Bay Area and takes a position teaching Occult Studies, planning to stay in the US for at least a year and possibly longer.

He's been to America before, but only "on holiday" and never for very long. He has enough money that living expenses aren't a problem. What I want to know is: what things would likely stand out to him as "different" between the UK and the Bay Area, specifically Palo Alto? (I'm from the Bay Area, so I'm familiar with that. I've been to England once, in 1997, but I'm not sure how helpful that would be).

What would be culture-shock things for him? What might he find himself oddly homesick for? What might confound him because it's so different? If it matters, his home is in a small village in Surrey, and he spends a lot of time in London so he's a fairly urban kind of guy. He's also open-minded and willing to try new things.

Thanks in advance!

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Ninja covered a lot already, but the Brits I've known get oddly homesick for whatever comfort foods they can't find in the US.
Fortunately there is plenty of canned spaghetti and beans, but I can't remember if you see Cadbury flakes in the US (a lot of people are sentimental about those from childhood, stuck in an ice cream), or just the different brands for everything.
A decent 'national' newspaper is another one. Decent tea. In supermarkets it's ridiculously expensive (no PG Tips either). In restaurants, they'll hand you a little pot and the bag on the side, so it never steeps properly. Or worse, they'll hand you a glass of some cold, vile, vaguely lemony tasting beverage

ETA - the 'lunchtime drinking frowned upon' comment - which I can verify, triggered another one for me. Standard office hours wherever I worked in Britain (and I temped for the first year, so I was exposed to many different work places) were later - coming in between 9 and 10 am was normal. In 'Puritannical' North America, it's much earlier, there are far fewer paid holidays and people are much more 'nose to the grindstone', in my experience.

Putputt said:

Let's see...things which Mr. Putt noticed the first time he came to Cali...

-"Very friendly people who talk to me!" SO SMILEY. SO FRIENDLY. SO HAPPY. (He didn't notice this in Boston.)

-He found it harder to understand people in Boston than people in Cali.

-The huge trucks on the freeways.

-The sheer number of people wearing hoodies and car number plates that show which universities they go to.

-How expensive the foods in supermarkets are, but restaurants are relatively cheap.

-The fact that there's an annual house tax.

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Being from New England, yeah, the whole smiley, friendly thing is a no go.

Speaking as a native New Englander who spent 8 weeks living in Yorkshire, I can tell you what I missed when I came back.

The chocolate in this country pales in comparison to British chocolate. I loved the Cadbury Dairy Milk bars. Hershey Bars are not worth the trouble.

On the other hand, the ice cream over here is far superior to the ice cream over there. I don't know if it's still true, but in the 80s they had lard in British Ice Cream. That's just gross.

Fish and chips and mushy peas are just not available over here. I learned to make mushy peas at home.

Steak and Kidney pie doesn't exist in this country, at least not around here. I used to be able to find it imported in a tin, but not anymore.

Funny how these are all food related. I have lots of horse comparisons I could make as well, because I was a working student in a British Horse Society program while I was over there, but I'm not sure any of that would be relevant.

The lack of public transportation in this country is a major, gigantic difference. I relied almost completely on public transport while in the UK, and I was in a very rural area.

Houses over there are also way older than houses over here. And made of different materials. No thatched roofs over here.

In America:

The tea is vile - bring your own teabags. The Tazo chai ones are quite pleasant for a change though.

The chocolate ain't much better (Godiva is okay, but muchos $). Dark chocolate minty M&Ms are quite tasty, by US standards.

People generally have better manners, say please & thank you, hold the door open, do more than grunt at you in shops, etc.

Getting asked for ID whilst buying beer - there must be some pretty haggard 21 year olds in Denver and Seattle, that's all I can say, as I'm well on the wrong side of 30.

Health-related adverts/commercials in three parts-
1). This is (name) who has (disease) and has a miserable life.
2). (Name) has started taking (medication) which means (name) is now as fit as a butcher's dog and ready to climb Everest this weekend.
3). (Medication) can have numerous unfortunate side effects, which always seem to be erectile disfunction and/or death, but (name) still recommends it.

Subtle language differences, which I'm reasonable with after heavy-duty research for the US-based parts of my story.

Each supermarket has a whole aisle devoted to fluorescent sugar-laden breakfast cereal. Heaven!

The cinnamon tastes different - because it's apparently grown somewhere else than the cinnamon sold in the UK. I prefer the Limey type as the American tastes like artificial flavouring.

Much bigger spaces in car parks/parking lots because of all those big-ass pick-up trucks.

Supermarket trolleys/carts are massive!

Not as obsessed with the weather.

I was quite happy to drive 500+ miles per day on a couple of days when I had a long way between stops without anything to see en-route. Here I remember grumbling like mad because I once drove from Manchester to London and then back on one day.

A lot more police out and about, especially on the road. It's not often you see the Dibble driving around over here.

I've been to San Francisco, if you want my take on that city (i.e. from a visiting Englishwoman's perspective).

Yummy food - buffalo burgers with sweet potato fries in Colorado, anything Mexican or similar in New Mexico and Arizona. I love the SW - best greedy road tripping!

If you're in more rural areas, people want to speak to you because you're English and then lavish adoration on your accent. Surreal, but quite touching/nice. In Idaho mine's apparently "sexy" - haha!

You can get a lb of delicious fresh strawberries in Target for about half the price you'd pay for inferior ones in the UK.

Now you buggers have made me want to go road trippin' again! :-(

I'll keep thinking...

Oh yeah, anything artificially grape flavoured - I can't get enough. I bring about 20 packets of grape Jello back and ration it as it works out about $4.50 for a small packet if you can find it over here. Grape Gatorade, the grape one in Jolly Ranchers (no road trip is complete without a semi-melted bag of JRs in the glove box)... if it's grape, it's in my belly.

In the UK the equivalent is blackcurrant, which I'm not arsed on.

Need. More. Grape.

AND - this is the worst - public restrooms have toilet cubicle doors with huge gaps down each side. How am I supposed to relax on the throne when anyone in the queue/line could be having a snoop?! I asked someone about why the loo doors are as they are, but they didn't seem to think it was anything out of the ordinary. Sorry, but inch-wide gaps at each side are beyond wrong.

Los Pollos Hermanos said:

In America:


People generally have better manners, say please & thank you, hold the door open, do more than grunt at you in shops, etc.

Not as obsessed with the weather.

I was quite happy to drive 500+ miles per day on a couple of days when I had a long way between stops without anything to see en-route. Here I remember grumbling like mad because I once drove from Manchester to London and then back on one day.


If you're in more rural areas, people want to speak to you because you're English and then lavish adoration on your accent. Surreal, but quite touching/nice. In Idaho mine's apparently "sexy" - haha!


I'll keep thinking...

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Clearly, you did not visit New England.

One of the things a British import once mentioned to me was how completely disgusted he was the first time someone mentioned eating "biscuits and gravy."

The closest I've been to New England is NYC, otherwise the furthest east I've been is Louisiana. My friend's boyfriend got a load of grief from the Plastic Paddies in Boston for being English (he's a mellow kind of guy and would never stir up any unpleasantness) and was accused of all manner of things pertaining to the potato famine. !!! If I ever went there and got similar treatment I'd just point out that I'm part Dubliner because of said famine - see what they said to that. ;-) I don't consider myself Irish, btw, although I do like Cadbury's tiffin bars which you can't get in the UK. Back to my belly again, I see.

Biscuits and gravy certainly does conjour up some quite disturbing ideas. Imagine cookies with brown lumpy meat gravy on 'em! I've seen American style biscuits and that creamy gravy and can't say the look of them floated my boat, although I did get in the habit of smothering US biscuits with peanut butter and grape jelly last year if they were available at breakfast. How's that for disgusting?!